Evolving literacies and emergent ICTs

There seems to be a growing willingness to acknowledge the evolution of literacies by more and more stakeholders. While students have been exposed to these new literacies for most of their lives, it has taken longer for academia to come to speed. While this certainly does not apply to all members of the educational community, the truth is we have been slower to embrace the technologies than the students have been. Specifically today’s readings have brought up the issues of how a person’s literacy level might reflect on them in other way i.e.if they don’t use upper letters at all in a formal email, I would assume certain things about them. I would pidgeon hole them as being part of a certain category of the population ( high school teenagers?)

The fact some politicians have embraced some of the social networking media as tools to help them get their messages across– or even elected, as has been widely argued in the case of Barack Obama’s election in the United States– is a sign that these “new” literacies can no longer be considered marginal. In fact popularity, in terms of how many followers one has on Twitter, is deemed so important there are companies that offer as their main product a service which guarantees adding 100000 legitimate followers to one’s Twitter account.

It seems to me that, at this point in time at least, the current pedagogical practices are not consistently up to speed with emergent and educational technologies. The number of students who are benefitting from the new ICTs is dependent on many variables including, teachers’ personal interest, school board’s willingness to spend the necessary funds to provide the vast amounts of professional development required to keep up with such rapidly emerging, and changing, technologies, and the students’ own ethno-geo-social demographics.